Simplifying Property & Parking Management with Smart Building Apps

by on June 13, 2018

Published: June 14th, 2018

New to the CENGN community and eager to begin their project, Smart Building Apps is a growing Canadian company based out of Ottawa. Smart Building Apps is a software application designed to simplify building management and provide cost-savings to property managers. To complete their IoT project, Smart Building Apps will be implementing their product on the CENGN Cloud and then will drive heavy amounts of traffic to our servers to test its processing rate. By testing the requirements needed to support their solution when usage is increased, Smart Building Apps will have third party validation of the scalability performance of their solution in which they can take to clients looking for a durable, scalable solution.

Experience in the Property Management Industry
The leadership team at Smart Building Apps comes fully equipped with decades of experience working in the residential and commercial property management industry. Their previous involvement of providing security services to property managers gave their founder, Denis Condie, and the team at Smart Building Apps an inside look at the challenges property managers face on a regular basis. Through these insights, Smart Building Apps was formed and since then they have developed a suite of solutions property managers can use to simplify their job and life for their tenants. Through their app, property managers can send out building announcements, receive maintenance requests from tenants, and manage amenity scheduling. Within their suite of solutions is their smart parking solution, which is the software they will be testing at CENGN. This tool has been developed to specifically help residential and commercial property owners and managers easily rent out parking space.

Smart Parking
The smart parking solution allows its users to purchase parking spaces from commercial and residential parking space suppliers. After downloading the Smart Parking App, users enter their license plate information, parking duration, and pay – all through the app. Now that they are registered and have parked, a security company can use the registered information to check on each parking lot ensuring only authorized vehicles fill the spaces. This new way of paid parking is not only easier for space owners, it removes the cost of hardware equipment like gates and payment machines. As an added bonus, the application is also configured with Google Maps API, so users can see locations of available parking spaces and register their location when parked.

Project Setup
Testing the amount of data traffic Smart Building Apps will require to scale is the validation that large commercial property managers are looking for before they adopt the smart parking solution. This will let their potential clients know if the company is ready to handle their much-increased user requirements.

To setup the project, Smart Building Apps will be deploying their smart parking server and jMeter traffic generators on the CENGN Testbed. They have developed scripts to simulate traffic as a user moves through each phase of their application. During execution of the project, jMeter will send traffic through different website routes, replicating many users simultaneously using the application. By increasing the traffic load to be processed by the Smart Parking Server, Smart Building Apps will be able to determine how many users can enter their parking information on the app at a single time.

The CENGN Testing Advantage
As a company transitions from startup to growth stage, refinements need to be made to technology products and services to ensure they scale effectively. Ramping up the number of users creating traffic unveils unforeseen problems that never occurred when operating in the past. CENGN’s testing environment will allow Smart Building Apps to generate heavy traffic flow in a secure environment without losing service quality to a client.